The A to Z of Postmodern Life: Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties

I don’t think I am postmodern. Some days I’m not even sure if I qualify as modern. I tried to approach this book in a suitably ironic way, zapping (chapter 34) and browsing and reading its alphabetically arranged chapters at random. It seemed to add precisely zero, though, so I went back to the old fashioned premodern technique of linear reading, page after page. This is pretty much the problem with most of the detritus of popular culture that gets lumbered with the postmodern tag; it is just a modish, lazy way of attempting to define things which, when subject to scrutiny, are not really that fresh after all. Postmodernism, in common with post-feminism and post-fascism, is an evasion rather than a definition. Dissent (chapter 6) is to be found elsewhere than in this self-referential cul-de-sac.

Avoiding the hype (chapter 12) and the lies (chapter 15) though, Ziauddin Sardar is quite engaging company and his critique of such topics as Americana (chapter 2), Terrorism (chapter 26) and Lists (chapter 16) is both perceptive and politically acute. The question he poses at the outset is surely one we have all asked ourselves recently: ‘Is it just me… or are the times we live in out of joint?’

Quite appropriately (ironic, really), the term ‘postmodern’ in the title is a bit of a misnomer but I suppose a more accurate label such as ‘some well written and thought-provoking musings on globalization (chapter 10), tradition (chapter 28) and identity (chapter 12)’ was rejected as being insufficiently zingy and out of tune with the zeitgeist.

WEB EXCLUSIVE For decades the US has been jailing more and more of its own citizens. The result, as Bernice Yeung reports, is an increasing number of innocent victims inside, as well as outside, the criminal-justice system – and growing agitation

If you would like to know something about what's actually going on, rather than what people would like you to think was going on, then read the New Internationalist.

– Emma Thompson –

A subscription to suit you

Save money with a digital subscription. Give a gift subscription that will last all year. Or get yourself a free trial to New Internationalist. See our choice of offers.

New Internationalist reports on issues of world poverty and inequality. We focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide in the fight for global justice. More about our work